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If a picture is worth a thousand words, what about a video?

Every student loves it when a teacher presents a video in front of the class. Every single student. If one tells you otherwise = liar. What is great now is that we have several different services we can use to show and share videos to them. One that particularly stands out is YouTube. In 2014, Pretty much everyone knows what YouTube is and how to use it, and youngsters are most certainly the ones that spend the most time on it. As soon as you use YouTube in your classroom you become relevant. You use a product students can relate to. This is important because if the content of your course is fresh and interesting, you win students’ attention. Adding to that, YouTube hosts a plethora of videos that can accompany any types of lesson for free and with a fast and easy access. (If you want a tip, use Google Chrome browser and install the Adblock Plus plugin, you will never have to wait after an add for the video to start). For these reasons, YouTube is something a teacher should try to implement in the classroom on a regular basis.

What’s great is that YouTube has a useful education channel you can subscribe to. You will always get new content that suits your needs from this channel. It is always fun the kick start a class with a little video that introduces the subject or activity you want to present to your students. With a YouTube video, it is easy to engage with students on current trending topics and start interactive discussions. Your classroom gets more intimate and students feel involve with the source of the material. As mention on an article by Michelle Jaworski on The Daily Dot: “A lot of teachers now use hooks, so they start with the short YouTube video to get kids engaged [and] no matter what’s on YouTube, if it’s in a classroom they’re excited by it.” Additionally, What is fun with a video service like that is that you have complete control of what you want to show with the playback controls. All this in a clean and simple interface

They are many channels that can provide fun and interesting videos. The Mashable website created a list of 10 YouTube channels that will make you smarter. On this blog you will find the ten most popular educational YouTube videos in 2013. This just goes to show how much content is available on this video sharing service. Also, according to this article, this “service has been adopted as the de facto video sharing site for social networking, business, government and education throughout most of the developed world”. So yeah, YouTube is feature rich and crawls with credible sources. You can find virtually every instructional video possible. If you have a question, someone has already answered it with a YouTube video. Thus, it is easy to give homework to your students and ask them to go on YouTube in order to complete a task. Moreover, using YouTube this way will arouse students desire to learn outside of class.